Mencken Quotes

The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered. ~ H.L. Mencken

If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ H.L. Mencken

Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway. ~ H.L. Mencken

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. ~ H.L. Mencken

Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity - he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit. ~ H.L. Mencken

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it. ~ H.L. Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. ~ H.L. Mencken

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. ~ H.L. Mencken

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. ~ H.L. Mencken

The worshiper is the father of the gods. ~ H.L. Mencken

The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy; he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case. ~ H.L. Mencken

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them. ~ H.L. Mencken

The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman. ~ H.L. Mencken

Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives. ~ H.L. Mencken

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ... [This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest. ~ H.L. Mencken

To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin. ~ H.L. Mencken

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. ~ H.L. Mencken

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion. ~ H.L. Mencken

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out. ~ H.L. Mencken

Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. ~ H.L. Mencken

This book came to me for review, but when I observed its count of pages I quietly dropped it behind the piano. ~ H.L. Mencken

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. ~ H.L. Mencken

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it. ~ H.L. Mencken

There is no record in history of a happy philosopher. ~ H.L. Mencken

Believing passionately in the palpably not true ... is the chief occupation of mankind. ~ H.L. Mencken

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it. ~ H.L. Mencken

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly. ~ H.L. Mencken

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram. ~ H.L. Mencken

But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant. ~ H.L. Mencken

It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made. ~ H.L. Mencken

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists. ~ H.L. Mencken

[Texas is] the place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest to see the least. ~ H.L. Mencken

The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment. ~ H.L. Mencken

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. ~ H.L. Mencken

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob ~ H.L. Mencken

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions. ~ H.L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. ~ H.L. Mencken

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. ~ H.L. Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible. ~ H.L. Mencken

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year? ~ H.L. Mencken

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority. ~ H.L. Mencken

He believed that there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law and morality, a class acutely adaptable and immoral; a class bent on achieving, not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top, of the superman. ~ H.L. Mencken

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him ~ H.L. Mencken

The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small. ~ H.L. Mencken

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. ~ H.L. Mencken

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. ~ H.L. Mencken

If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man. ~ H.L. Mencken

The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn. ~ H.L. Mencken

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. ~ H.L. Mencken

The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without. ~ H.L. Mencken

In the United States ... politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. ~ H.L. Mencken

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people. ~ H.L. Mencken

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen. ~ H.L. Mencken

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. ~ H.L. Mencken

Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both. ~ H.L. Mencken

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression. ~ H.L. Mencken

Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives. ~ H.L. Mencken

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ~ H.L. Mencken

I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind. ~ H.L. Mencken

When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife. ~ H.L. Mencken

Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race. ~ H.L. Mencken

Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. ~ H.L. Mencken

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. ~ H.L. Mencken

[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century - perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man. ~ H.L. Mencken

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. ~ H.L. Mencken

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence
his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms
in short, his hereditary cowardice ... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies. ~ H.L. Mencken

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant. ~ H.L. Mencken

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion
and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man
the ideal civilized man
is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately
when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it. ~ H.L. Mencken

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup. ~ H.L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil. ~ H.L. Mencken

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow. ~ H.L. Mencken

Ask the average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium - what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other ideas - and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he will nominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all its other advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and half envious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if one questioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. And yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent superstition. ~ H.L. Mencken

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. ~ H.L. Mencken

The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is like trying to breedcattle with all cows and no bulls. ~ H.L. Mencken

The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged. ~ H.L. Mencken

No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. ~ H.L. Mencken

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. ~ H.L. Mencken

[Art is] an attempt to escape from life. ~ H.L. Mencken

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. ~ H.L. Mencken

Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never. ~ H.L. Mencken

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them. ~ H.L. Mencken

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. ~ H.L. Mencken

The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English. ~ H.L. Mencken

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y ~ H.L. Mencken

A nun, at best, is only half a woman, just as a priest is only half a man. ~ H.L. Mencken

There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal. ~ H.L. Mencken

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard. ~ H.L. Mencken

The worst government is the most moral. ~ H.L. Mencken

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it. ~ H.L. Mencken

You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public ~ Scott Adams

I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding. ~ H.L. Mencken

Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place ~ H.L. Mencken

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it. ~ H.L. Mencken

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. ~ H.L. Mencken

There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind. ~ H.L. Mencken

Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities. ~ H.L. Mencken